I’ve been up since 5 in the morning, and I’m perhaps a little too sleepy to be blogging, but no matter; this made my evening. If you’ve ever tried to make sense of twelve-tone music, or have ever perhaps accidentally attended a performance of Lulu or Moses und Aron when you really meant to see Tosca, this lady has a rather perspicuous explanation:

A comment with regard to the rank nominalism on display: of course meaning is dependent on minds rather than on bits of matter. The interesting question is whether mind is dependent on matter, or vice versa. The former, I would argue, makes no sense (ha!). And having some Thomist inclinations, I’d go so far as to say that matter devoid of any meaning (anything that could be grasped by a rational mind) would be matter devoid of any formal structure, and hence wouldn’t really be any thing at all, but rather just sheer potentiality that could become actualized by some meaningful form.

Which then raises the aesthetic question of whether attempting to abstract the tonal ‘meanings’ from the chromatic keys is really….oh nevermind!